Australia is the most expensive region in which we operate, but for an interesting reason. We peer with virtually every ISP in the region except one: Telstra. Telstra, which controls approximately 50% of the market, and was traditionally the monopoly telecom provider, charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world — 20x the benchmark ($200/Mbps). Given that we are able to peer approximately half of our traffic, the effective bandwidth benchmark price is $100/Mbps. To give you some sense of how out-of-whack Australia is, at CloudFlare we pay about as much every month for bandwidth to serve all of Europe as we do to for Australia. That’s in spite of the fact that approximately 33x the number of people live in Europe (750 million) versus Australia (22 million). If Australians wonder why Internet and many other services are more expensive in their country than anywhere else in the world they need only look to Telstra. What's interesting is that Telstra maintains their high pricing even if only delivering traffic inside the country. Given that Australia is one large land mass with relatively concentrated population centers, it's difficult to justify the pricing based on anything other than Telstra's market power. In regions like North America where there is increasing consolidation of networks, Australia's experience with Telstra provides a cautionary tale.

Eh I find the blog post very meh. It looks like the same type of rubbish we get here "OH MY GOD THEY PAY $X in poor African nation 1 why does it cost so much here!?!?!?

<RANT>

The only way you can do a proper pricing comparison is if you compare everything, and these people are not economists, so you'd have to check the cost of Property, Equipment, Staff, power, Taxes, and the list goes on and on and on and on.

Lets just start launching into articles about how my Egg Sandwich costs more in Auckland than it does at the bakery in X town.

I do not deny there is no reason not to look at the price differentials between countries for telecommunication services, but I'm yet to see ANYTHING that is a proper study just half pie jobs that go "In X place they pay this much and we're around the same size with the same population so it should cost around the same"

Lazarui: The only way you can do a proper pricing comparison is if you compare everything, and these people are not economists, so you'd have to check the cost of Property, Equipment, Staff, power, Taxes, and the list goes on and on and on and on.

If this stuff was such an issue I doubt you'd see such a high peering percentage. Seems to me like Telstra simply have no interests in peering when it's such a cash cow for them.